This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and more specifically to granting permission to act on behalf of a user in a social networking system.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Social networking systems maintain a significant amount of user-specific information and information describing relationships between users on the social networking system. To allow users to regulate access to their information by other users, many social networking systems allow their users to grant or deny access to user-specific information based on relationships between the users.
Conventionally, social networking systems typically allow businesses and other entities to maintain the same presence on social networking systems as individual users by allowing administrators authorized to act on behalf of entities to create and maintain information associated with the entities. For example, administrators may create advertisements, create posts, respond to comments, and perform other activities on the social networking system on behalf of an entity. However, conventional social networking systems do not allow entities customize the roles of administrators based on the relationships between the administrators and entities or on the experience levels of various administrators.
Further, conventional social networking systems also do not allow an entity to extend permission to act on its behalf to users associated with a different entity that has a relationship with the entity. For example, a conventional social networking system does not allow a retailer to grant an employee of an advertising agency permission to access information about funding sources of the retailer's advertising based on the retailer's relationship to the advertising agency via the social networking system. Additionally, while a conventional social networking system allow a user to specify privacy settings limiting additional users' ability to access information maintained by social networking system and associated with the user, conventional social networking systems do not allow the user to maintain separate sets of information associated with the user and regulate access of additional users to the sets of information based on a type of connection between the user and an additional user.